It hasn’t been a very good week for the people who like the truth, or education, or history, or any of those sorts of things. Perhaps the most depressing challenge to education this past week came from Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, a Republican facing a tough reelection campaign. According to a recent article from Inside Higher Ed, last Thursday Johnson called higher education a “cartel” and said that it is wasteful to pay professors to teach history courses when we could simply show students Ken Burns documentaries.

One of the examples I always used -- if you want to teach the Civil War across the country, are you better off having, I don’t know, tens of thousands of history teachers that kind of know the subject, or would you be better off popping in 14 hours of Ken Burns’s Civil War tape and then have those teachers proctor based on that excellent video production already done? You keep duplicating that over all these different subject areas.

Johnson went on to say that students could gain the research skills they need to understand history through Google searches of the internet.

To be fair, Johnson’s basic idea is similar to some of the schemes schools have been trying to save money. He, for example, would be OK with having one professor per subject who would broadcast lectures across the country.

I’m sure everyone reading this can see the obvious problems with Johnson’s ideas: Videos are not interactive, leaving no ability for students to ask questions or discuss themes and issues beyond a list of facts. Lecturers do more than just read textbooks to students (or should—I had one professor who just read the textbook, and it was awful). Videos also are a product of their time and cannot easily change to accommodate new information, new analysis, or new applications. Ken Burns’s The Civil War debuted on PBS in 1990. Imagine a computer course taught by the intro video to Windows 95! I say this as someone who has met Ken Burns and had a very nice conversation with him: His documentary is not a substitute for studying the historiography or archaeology of the Civil War.

But the darker part of Johnson’s scheme is that he would have students substitute Google searches for curated facts. Perhaps there is a good reason for that. The internet is home to the wildest, wooliest, and most vile conspiracies you can imagine, and these conspiracies, especially around history, tend to pull in the direction of conservative prejudices.

We need look no further than Monday’s edition of InfoWars, the conspiracy theory show hosted by Alex Jones, a conspiracy theorist who has received support from Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who has appeared on the program in the past. On Monday Jones played host to gigantologist Steve Quayle and the founder of the Curves fitness chain, Gary Heavin, who is active in conservative politics. Both men were on to discuss paranoid conservative memes and ended up discussing how God is using Donald Trump to deliver judgment on humanity for failing to enact mass genocide against those who carry the Nephilim bloodline.

Here's the full episode:

And here’s a brief clip of a key exchange:

After blasting the mainstream media, Quayle announced that a fly landing on Pres. Obama proves that he is Satan’s minion (Beelzebub, the Lord of the Flies), and Quayle called Donald Trump “God’s prosecuting attorney.” Quayle said that Trump has been empowered by God to reveal the sins of American public officials in order to prepare the way for a cleansing judgement.

“Steve’s taught me a lot about this,” Heavin said after a lengthy discussion of paranoid conservative talking points about everything from ISIS invasions to Hillary Clinton’s “literal” murder spree. “There’s no aliens. There’s demons.” Heavin went on to explain that Quayle has taught him the true history of fallen angels, their sexual liaisons with human women, and the giants that they birthed.

Heavin, Quayle, and Jones all agree that “the elite” are engaged in incestuous interbreeding with one another to preserve their satanic gene pool. The men explain that genocide is periodically necessary to “cleanse the DNA” of Nephilim blood.

Quayle said that while the Nephilim elite want him dead for revealing the “truth,” he is not dead because God is protecting him. Heavin adds that “we” Evangelical Christians can “take our country back,” though he does not say from whom. By implication, the enemy is non-Christians, liberals, sexual minorities—all those with Nephilim genes. The two men claim that 82% of Americans (all non-Nephilim Americans) will be killed off in the coming Nephilim-liberal genocide through poisoned vaccines, chemtrails, or “nanites” unless Evangelicals “take our country back” from the Nephilim-liberal elite first.

The great thing about these kinds of appearances is that they tear away the veneer of holiness that these pseudo-Christians cloak themselves with. Quayle has never been a holy man, but he plays one to shill his books, his merchandise line, and the “prepping” schemes he promotes. Here he casts off the persona he puts on for Jim Bakker on Bakker’s “Christian” infomercial show. Now he is simply a raving right-wing lunatic, fearful of impending social change and putting on the mantle of Jeremiah to justify his anger and outrage, but sounding less like Jeremiah than a reverse Howard Beale. He is explicitly a political actor engaging in explicitly political discourse, peppered with angels and demons to give supernatural support to his explicitly political points.

Alex Jones claims that Charles Darwin admitted to receiving the theory of evolution in a “hallucination” from demonic “entities.” He is referring, in a mangled way, to Darwin’s lifelong psychological health problems, which included pain, visual hallucinations, and what he described as 25 years of “spasmodic daily & nightly flatulence.”

Jones also believes that “the elite” are not atheists but secretly “worship angels while they sit in big bowls of feces. You can’t make that up. That’s mainstream news!” Quayle returned to the fecal imagery later, adding that Nephilim and liberals are obsessed with poop because it symbolizes death. Heavin adds that there is no release from earthly problems because the Rapture will not come before Satan has taken control of the Earth, which is why Evangelicals must not withdraw from politics to await the Rapture. Instead, they must take a stand against the Nephilim-liberal death cult, presumably by electing the chaos candidate Donald Trump, the mouthpiece of God.

Heaven help us all.

This just goes to prove that the Nephilim conspiracy theories are not, as so many claim, merely religious revival or even “fun,” but rather a justification for a specific political agenda whose explicit aim is political power for fundamentalist conservatives, and whose stated goal is a purge of all who disagree. How is it that the so-called Christians ended up being the ones promising to enact in the name of Jesus the totalitarian, violent campaign of fear they imagine led God to send the Flood against the Nephilim the first time around?

The American public just does not have a credible Presidential candidate.

And this has been reflected in interviews of the US public on UK News Channels.

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Bob Jase

8/24/2016 01:34:42 pm

How many lives has the checkout operator ruined via serial bankrupcy?

Tht's the one way Trump resembles god - he always needs money.

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Day Late and Dollar Short

8/24/2016 12:42:53 pm

Ron Johnson is part for the course up here. The AB620 bill proposal is egregious. I don't want to say our governor is a monster...but he's a monster. Plus! Paul Ryan.

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orang

8/24/2016 01:41:17 pm

Time and time again we all see examples of the GOP not giving value to education. Behind the scenes, they like an ignorant uninformed public because it is more gullible and malleable in order to spread their
agenda.

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DaveR

8/24/2016 01:50:40 pm

I think most so called leaders all around the world would prefer an uneducated electorate.

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crainey

8/24/2016 01:47:31 pm

Before this political season I would always have two distinctly different debates with my conservative nutty “uncles”: the ancient alien/giants/mermaids debate and then the political debate. It somehow never dawned on me that these two different trains of irrationality were actually running on the same tracks. The big thing Donald Trump has done is illustrate how all these ideas spring from one wellspring of crazy. Thank god for the Democrats and Hillary. They are the only things standing between us and a country run by these irrational mad men.

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Scott Hamilton

8/24/2016 01:48:35 pm

"Jones also believes that 'the elite' are not atheists but secretly 'worship angels while they sit in big bowls of feces. You can’t make that up. That’s mainstream news!'"

I'd google what the heck he's talking about there, but my search profile can't take the hit considering my love of anime and violent puppet shows.

sign out of the google account, and then search without it knowing who you are.

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Only Me

8/24/2016 05:58:28 pm

What's worse than the message or the messengers themselves, are the people who will swallow up this lunacy.

I'm also going to have to agree with DaveR. Virtually all world leaders have been more than interested in an uneducated electorate. That makes it easier to get into and remain in office, always making great sounding promises but never having to deliver on them.

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V

8/24/2016 06:16:00 pm

I actually think it's simpler than that.

There is no degree that you have to have to be a politician, no test you have to take, nothing to ensure quality. It has long been my opinion that the vast majority of politicians prefer an uneducated public because they, themselves, are not particularly well-educated and they don't like feeling ignorant. And the less well-educated they are, the more they seem to spout off crap like this Senator guy did.

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Jim

8/24/2016 06:41:33 pm

Why go to university at all, simply watch the courses on google. You get your degrees by answering true and false tests. No written papers needed, no grading of students needed, true or false ?

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Only Me

8/24/2016 06:54:35 pm

Oh, dear God.

It just occurred to me this is the type of higher education Xplrr would fully support. Just bypass the inconvenient parts of academia altogether and go straight to rewriting history.

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Jim

8/24/2016 07:03:39 pm

Oh ya, our favorite lunatic would have hundreds of degrees up his yin yang.

Just yesterday, you asked how anyone could take me seriously due to my faith. Once again, here you are needing me for attention. I swear, you are worse than a toddler going through the Terrible Twos.

An Over-Educated Grunt

8/25/2016 10:33:51 am

If the relevance of God is an opinion, a matter of personal preference, then your preference for a hard "no" is equally a matter of opinion. If on the other hand it is a matter of fact then the best you can muster is that the evidence available leads you to doubt the probability of a divine figure, not to deny the possibility. Anything less is deeply unscientific.

TheBigMike

8/25/2016 12:02:27 pm

"God is off topic to this discussion"

OnlyMe was simply using a well established societal exclamation of disbelief and exasperation in reference to the revelation that was subsequently laid out: the thought that Xplrr would endorse "google universities"
There was no intention or attempt to bring the concept of divinity or higher powers into the discussion.
As much as it may pain you to hear this, references to "god" can and are done in secular ways as well without actually invoking religion.

Back in the early 2000s a politician in Australia was rightly slammed for suggesting that students should "Just Google It" rather than go to school.

But given the rise of the anti-intellectual 'Safe-space/Trigger warning' movement in schools I can actually see something like the abominable suggestion gaining traction.

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Jim

8/24/2016 06:58:40 pm

Just think of the money saved by outsourcing an entire University to a computer hub in a third world country !

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Graham

8/24/2016 10:44:00 pm

Indeed,

For the last few days I've been getting messages pointing me to a story on Fox News which makes the dubious claim that Baltimore has decreed that no student in public education is allowed to receive a grade less than 50% that item is linked below:

I'm still trying to run the original story to earth as I find it impossible to believe.

Jim

8/25/2016 01:51:18 am

Yikes,,,, so everyone passes their grades no matter what ! wow ! I guess the word "earn" should be deleted from the English language.

V

8/26/2016 02:28:28 pm

...yeah, article is misleading. If you actually go to the manual itself, it says that behavior, completion, and ability to work with others will have a SEPARATE grade, rather than being dumped into the same grade as academic ability. Which makes a LOT of sense, because you have to approach behavior-based problems really differently from academic-based problems. No amount of tutoring in math is going to help a kid whose problem is that he won't listen to the teacher he hates, and no amount of therapy is going to help a kid who just doesn't have the background to get the math.

And in what world do you think 50% is a passing grade? Minimum passing grade is at least a 69% anywhere you go in the US.

Jim

8/27/2016 05:09:30 am

V,,,,"And in what world do you think 50% is a passing grade? "

A good percentage of this very world we live on has 50% as a passing grade. Forgive me for not being an American.

Day Late and Dollar Short

8/25/2016 11:38:03 am

Cause having a place for victims of rape to gather and feel safe is extremely anti-intellectual...

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V

8/26/2016 02:04:34 pm

Um....actually, "Safe space" for schools is extremely and highly based in science. Psychology being the science in question. There have been numerous studies that have shown that people of all ages, but children in particular, do not learn as effectively when they do not feel safe--that personal security takes precedence in usage of brain power over abstract knowledge intake. You know, somewhere around a hundred years' worth of studies. Given that the entire purpose of schools is EDUCATION, yes, safe spaces are fucking well IMPORTANT.

Trigger warnings are just polite and only scoffed at by assholes who think that they should have the right to say whatever they want without consequences, social or otherwise. They really do absolutely nothing to limit discussion, no matter what assholes think--it just means that before you start in on a subject, you let people know "We're going to be discussing some heavy topics today. Please be prepared for ____." It doesn't mean that oh, you can't talk about those things, or it wouldn't be a WARNING, now would it? And discussions, like learning, go SO much better when people aren't having hysterical freakouts because you sprang a flashback on them without warning.

You show YOURSELF to be the anti-intellectual one with your deep ignorance and dismissive and unwarranted attitude of superiority, not to mention a fool.

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A C

8/26/2016 06:29:59 pm

'Safe space' is 'places you can hide when you need to escape abuse not 'place we're going to lock you in forever so you don't have to listen to anything you don't want to hear'.

Technically safe spaces have always existed in universities, they've just been very specific and limited to groups that didn't need them that much.Its only the name and the broad concept that's new.

Complaining about 'safe spaces' is also nothing new and little more than the continuation of old fashioned bullying/hazing apologetics like "it builds character".

Reactionaries will always whine about entitlement when someone threatens to take one of their opportunities to enforce Social Darwinism away from them.

Shane Sullivan

8/24/2016 10:54:00 pm

"The internet is home to the wildest, wooliest, and most vile conspiracies you can imagine, and these conspiracies, especially around history, tend to pull in the direction of conservative prejudices."

All the more reason to learn *proper* use of google, wikipedia, etc., so as not to fall victim to its cerebral pollution. Alas, that's probably not what out senator is getting at.

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Frank Johnson

8/25/2016 12:07:55 am

This is insane. I can't believe it. I also can't believe Alex Jones could sink any lower. I guess I was wrong.

Thanks also for qualifying these clowns as pseudo-Christians, because I don't think they represent us at all.

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bkd69

8/25/2016 02:52:45 am

It's like watching dinosaurs making themselves go extinct due to the influence of some behavior changing parasite. I need to go listen to some Dave Emory to cleanse my mental palate.

But now that I think about it, a free bottle of colloidal silver would be pretty sweet.

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Mark L

8/25/2016 07:35:56 am

Can you change the comment software so you can permanently ban Templar Secrets? He's ruining any decent conversation in your comment section. I've had enough.

I wish I could, but unfortunately I can only manually delete comments.

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An Over-Educated Grunt

8/25/2016 10:39:26 am

There are other issues. An IP ban can be bypassed by dynamic IP use, which is normal for most ISPs, or doing like I do and read on one device and post from another (long but basically only time I can reliably post the computer I'm at blocks the comment box, so phone it is...). Banning a range of IPs is like killing every baby in Judea to make sure you get that one. Requiring registration and login just leads to dummy accounts. Evidence on hand suggests that Schizoname Drugmason will just do one of these because he displays obsessive behavior in his posting here.

I'll be honest, I don't envy Jason managing this circus.

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TheBigMike

8/25/2016 12:09:57 pm

Well said, and i will add this:

Jason, thank you very much for what you do with this blog and for putting up with all the craziness that comes with being a voice for reason and research. I, for one, really do appreciate the trouble you go to.

Joe Scales

8/26/2016 02:11:20 pm

The simple solution is to not respond to it in any form. Some here are compelled to banter back and forth, which is exactly what it wants. Only starving it will excise it on its own volition.

Seriously. To those that respond to it, why bother? You prove nothing and only lose credibility yourselves, contributing to incessant strings of nonsense. Make a vow, stick with it and leave it be.

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Clete

8/28/2016 01:19:09 am

I agree completely. I usually page past comments from "Templar Secrets". He has nothing of substance to offer and manages to push his one and only topic. Based on the number of people who used to respond to this blog, it would appear that he has driven off some of the long time readers and commenters. Also, it appears based on the sentence structure and topics that "Templar Secrets" is nothing more than "Time Machine" using another screen name.

Bill Morgan

8/28/2016 08:34:12 am

To be fair and balanced, when do you plan to do an article on the Bill and Hillary Clinton scandals? The Lies of the Clintons? The Clinton Foundation Scam that has taken millions from foreign governments and individuals for favors at the State Dept.? About Hillary's health which is getting worse day by day? Have you seen the Clinton Cash movie? The Hillary's America movie? Scandal after scandal follows the Clintons.

Someone murdered Seth Rich, the DNC staffer who leaked the DNC emails to Julian Assange at Wikileaks. Wikileaks is offering a $20,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the assassin(s). Assange has said more emails about Hillary are coming out, some which will show she has engaged in criminal acts. Will Hillary be going to prison? Or will she get off free again?

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DaveR

8/29/2016 09:30:52 am

I find someone offering a reward to bring someone to justice coming from a man, Julian, who is hiding in an embassy to escape prosecution for sexual assault hypocritical.

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Bill Morgan

8/29/2016 02:29:15 pm

Assange is not charged with any crime. Two women allege sexual assault. Assange denies the charges. Two days after the alleged sexual assault the two women posed in a picture with Assange smiling and laughing. This picture is on the internet. He is wanted for questioning by the Swedish police. They have not charged him with any crime.

However, if the Americans can get a hold of him, they will charge him with espionage crimes which could get him 35 years in prison. What do they want him for? For exposing the crimes of people in the American Government. More leaks coming that Assange says will expose Bill and Hillary of committing treason and murder. Word in the espionage world is that CIA hit teams are waiting for Assange if he leaves the Embassy in London.

DaveR

8/30/2016 07:55:04 am

However you want to defend his actions, the point remains he is accused of a crime and wanted for questioning and instead of defending himself and facing the allegations he's hiding in a foreign embassy to escape justice. Yet he continues to call for others he alleges have committed crimes to be held to justice. Still makes him a hypocrite.

Bill Morgan

8/30/2016 08:01:40 am

Not as big a hypocrite as Bill and Hillary. They are Big Time hypocrites. If he leaves the Embassy, the Americans can get a hold of him, and they will charge him with espionage crimes which could get him 35 years in prison. Of course Bill and Hillary have committed treason, but will get off free as long as Obama keeps protecting them. If Trump wins, he may have them prosecuted. Time will tell.

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I'm an author and editor who has published on a range of topics, including archaeology, science, and horror fiction. There's more about me in the About Jason tab.